Freedom Summer (36 page)

Throughout the Delta, it was “lay by time.” The cotton had been cleared of weeds, and for the next several weeks, there would be no sharecroppers in the fields, just tightly packed green bolls baking until they burst into fluff. The coming cotton crop was expected to be bountiful, the boll weevils reduced by generous sprayings of DDT. Across the rest of Mississippi, “lay by time” was simply known as August—the month when only a fool or a Yankee went out in the noonday sun. Volunteers knew the daily schedule now, but still they were counting the days.

“I am tired,” a man wrote home. “I want to go very much to a movie or to watch TV even. I want to be in Berkeley and do stupid things and don’t look behind me in the rearview mirror. I want to look at a white man and not hate his guts, and know he doesn’t hate me either.” A Connecticut woman admitted she missed the luxury of Westport—“sailing and swimming and my friends”—yet wrestled with guilt at the thought. A few pleaded with parents to let them stay on into fall:

(At her parents’ insistence, Ellen Lake went back to Radcliffe, then returned south the following summer.)

But most were ready for summer’s end. Clarksdale volunteers held a “depression session,” griping about how little they had accomplished. Elsewhere, a woman confessed, “If I stay here much longer, I’ll become hard. That’s what happens. . . . You lose patience with anyone that’s not right square on your side, the liberals and the moderates and ‘the good people’ caught in the middle, and the Negroes who won’t cooperate or are indifferent. They all become enemies.” Fatigue made even gentle hosts seem more like parents than friends. “She’s always in the same rut and the same statements,” one woman wrote of her host. “Very wearisome.”

Whether due to the heat or the ambient hatred, previous Augusts had unleashed numbing brutality—Emmett Till’s murder being just one example. And this August would oblige with a weekend when Mississippi verged on anarchy. Yet just as it ripened the cotton, lay-by time brought the flowering of Freedom Summer. During these “dog days,” Mississippi’s first touring theater dramatized black history on makeshift stages. Folksingers strummed in “hootenannies.” Two of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities snuck into Greenwood. And defying one last Mississippi tradition—of taking it easy in August—volunteers mounted their final surge, knocking on doors, signing up names, helping SNCC finish frantic preparations to take Freedom Summer to the national stage.

 

 

A grim irony surrounded the name of the juke joint frequented by volunteers in Greenwood. The sign above the door read Bullin’s Café, but the manager went by the name of Blood, so everyone called the place Blood’s. Inside, where a red neon glow lit pool tables and pinball games, Blood’s offered a safe—even air-conditioned—spot to talk over Greenwood’s escalating violence. More shots fired into the SNCC office. More canvassers assaulted, cars chased, Freedom Democrat forms thrown into the street. While SNCC struggled to quell black rage—“They keep killin’ our people, when are we goin’ to stop them? When? ”—a group of teenagers calling themselves “The Peacemakers” began pushing adults to be more militant. Silas McGhee, still trying to integrate the Leflore Theater, still getting beaten, chased, arrested, was elected Peacemaker president. Silas’s entire family, feisty Laura McGhee and her sons, was now leading the outcries at raucous, bitter mass meetings. So it was with some surprise that, on the night of August 10, a different kind of Freedom Song filled the Elks Hall where Martin Luther King had appeared so triumphantly in July.

Harry Belafonte had responded to a call for help. SNCC did not have enough money to send Freedom Democrats to the convention in Atlantic City. Throughout the first week of August, the world-famous calypso singer, who had helped bankroll the Freedom Rides and the March on Washington, held $50-a-plate dinners in five East Coast cities. With the discovery of bodies making headlines, money poured in, more than Belafonte could safely wire to Mississippi. He decided to go to Greenwood himself—carrying $60,000 in cash. For security, he took a friend. “They might think twice about killing
two
big niggers,” Belafonte joked to Sidney Poitier. Wary of Mississippi but wanting to help, Poitier agreed. Shortly after midnight on August 10, they sent word ahead. The singer whose “Banana Boat Song” had become a folk standard and the first black to win a Best Actor Oscar would arrive in Greenwood that same evening. Belafonte wanted to be met at the airport “by someone important,” COFO heard. Preferably Bob Moses. “No press on arrival, please.” Word of the visit electrified Greenwood, and by dusk, the Elks Hall was rocking.

Shortly after sunset, skimming in low over the Delta, the Piper Cub arrived right on time. So did the Klan. Three SNCC cars sat on the tarmac in the muggy darkness. From the small plane stepped the two celebrities, Belafonte’s wide smile instantly recognizable, Poitier’s onscreen serenity seeming on edge. James Forman met the pair, shook hands, and steered them to the middle car. The convoy pulled out and drove through the airport gate. Suddenly, headlights flashed in the distance. Belafonte, holding the satchel stuffed with cash, noted how comforting it was to see SNCC support all around them, but Forman told him the headlights belonged to Klansmen. For the next twenty minutes, the three vehicles wove through cotton fields like hunted rabbits. Klansmen repeatedly rammed the rear car, which shifted back and forth as a shield. When the Klan tried to pull alongside, the lead car fell back to block them. Poitier, who would later relive the chase while filming
In the Heat of the Night
, remembered the harrowing moments as “a ballet, though a nerve-wracking one.” Only when the convoy approached the edge of black Greenwood did the Klan turn back. The three cars finally pulled up at the Elks Hall. As they approached, Poitier and Belafonte could hear rising chants of “Freedom! Freedom! Freedomfreedomfreedomfreedom!”

Jogging behind James Forman, the two stars entered the Elks Hall. The crowd exploded. A woman lowered herself from the balcony to throw her arms around Belafonte. Freedom Songs followed, including one based on Belafonte’s hit:

Belafonte later sang his own “Day-O,” then, to great cheers, held up his satchel and handed it over. When Poitier stepped to the podium, his suavity failed him. “I have been a lonely man all my life,” he said, choking up, “until I came to Greenwood, Mississippi. I have been lonely because I have not found love, but this room is overflowing with it.” Belafonte and Poitier spent an anxious night in a house guarded by shotguns. To keep calm, they did calisthenics and told ghost stories. The next morning, they flew back to New York.

Harry Belafonte was the biggest star to grace Freedom Summer, but his was not the only famous voice. The Mississippi Caravan of Music ranged from little-known Greenwich Village acts to headliners who had just sold out the Newport Folk Festival. With the folk boom at its height, young urban whites had recently “discovered” old Mississippi bluesmen—Muddy Waters and Mississippi John Hurt had both played at Newport. Now folksingers came south to share their music. Singing in Freedom Schools, they introduced black children to English ballads and American folk songs. Singers were startled to meet kids who had never heard of Leadbelly, or even Mississippi-born “Big Bill” Broonzy. After evening performances at Freedom Houses, the musicians often sang with stragglers till well past midnight. For volunteers, the songs brought relief from long, lingering days. For singers, banjos and guitars kept terror at bay, terror that had gripped them the moment they entered Mississippi.

“Are you coming down here to sing for the niggers?” a man asked Pete Seeger when he landed in Jackson.

“I’ve been asked down here by some friends to sing,” Seeger replied. “I hope that anyone who wants to hear me can come, Negro or white.”

“Well, you just better watch your step,” the man said. “If we hadn’t been on the plane when I heard you talking I would have knocked the shit out of you.”

To Seeger, who had cut short a world tour to lend his voice to Freedom Summer, Mississippi was just another impoverished country, but for other singers, it was a nightmare. Judy Collins planned a two-week tour but, after singing in Greenville and Clarksdale, canceled further concerts. Phil Ochs, whose song “Too Many Martyrs” eulogized Emmett Till and Medgar Evers, was convinced he would be shot onstage. At each concert, Ochs had another singer scan the audience, then sprinted offstage after his last song. Black folksinger Julius Lester felt death all around him. “Each morning I wake thinking, today I die,” he wrote in his journal. Touring for two weeks, Lester slept in his car and lost fifteen pounds. Every car backfiring, every slam of a screen door, made him jump. But once back in Greenwich Village, Lester convinced other singers to head south. More came to Mississippi, although the no-shows included the Staples Singers, Tom Paxton, and Peter, Paul and Mary.

Other than polite applause, no one is sure how black kids reacted to whites strumming “Skip to My Lou” and “Hava Nagila.” But none could doubt their reaction to their first live drama.

On a sultry night in early August, beneath spotlights laced with swarming insects, six actors stared out from a barren stage behind the Freedom House in McComb. Adults fanned themselves. Squirming kids fell silent. Finally a white actor spoke.

“If God had intended for the races to mix, he would have mixed them himself. He put each color in a different place.”

Across the stage, a black man responded. “The American white man has a conscience, and the non-violent method appeals to that conscience.”

“Negroes are demanding something that isn’t so unreasonable,” a white woman pleaded. “To get a cup of coffee at a lunch counter, to get a decent job.”

“What they really feels on the inside never changes,” answered a black woman. “Eventually they’ll wind up calling you a nigger.”

Throughout August, the Free Southern Theater performed in cramped Freedom Schools, on Freedom House porches, beneath starry skies from McComb to Holly Springs. Pleading, praying, strutting each small stage, actors spoke the words of Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, and a host of archetypal Americans. Each performance of
In White America
reviewed subjects Freedom Schools had covered all summer—the Middle Passage to slavery, the truth about Reconstruction, the integration battle at Central High in Little Rock—but actors touched feelings teachers could never reach. For students, the drama re-created classroom history—for adults in the audience, the pain was personal.

In White America
drew standing-room-only crowds, stomping, clapping, clamoring for more. As if in church, people shouted, “That’s right!” and “Tell it!” In Mileston, the setting—a community center with one wall open to a bean field—brought Mississippi itself into the play. The new center was the gift of a southern California carpenter. Hearing of Freedom Summer, Abe Osheroff, veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade during the Spanish Civil War, raised $10,000, then drove to Mississippi to build “a beacon of hope and love in a sea of oppression and hatred.” In the Delta
, In White America
drew two dozen members of Indianola’s Citizens’ Council. While cops stood guard outside, actors strutted through Indianola’s new Freedom School, hamming it up for whites who watched in silence. All were polite, but one later said the play convinced him the summer project was Communist inspired. Local whites also watched the play on the sagging porch of the Ruleville Freedom School, where chickens and roosters crowded the stage. But regardless of the audience,
In White America
’s final scene, juxtaposing “We, the people . . .” with the strains of “Oh, Freedom,” brought crowds to their feet, and sent them out singing.

On Friday, August 14,
In White America
played in Greenville. Muriel Tillinghast was not in the audience. She had a Freedom Day to run. Since the first of the month, Muriel’s work had taken her deeper into the shimmering plantations of Issaquena and Sharkey counties. Sleeping on the floors of shacks—one host family had sixteen children—she was learning Mississippi from the inside out. She marveled at how sharecroppers could tell whose pickup was roaring past, just by its sound. She had learned which “firecracker” whites were bluffing and which were “not playin’.” Given a single contact in one “nasty little town” or another, she had scrounged up a half dozen with the courage to go to the courthouse. She now knew where to get the best meal in Mississippi—a savory stew of pork, rice, and beans served at Aaron Henry’s drugstore in Clarksdale. And she had mastered black Mississippi’s merciless time clock, waking at ungodly hours to talk to sharecroppers trudging to the fields, sleeping later before meeting maids crossing the tracks to clean and cook in white homes.

Responsibility for the Greenville project had restored all of Muriel’s nerve, with some to spare. Her feistiness came through in her letter to a SNCC staffer.